sabato 17 gennaio 2015

Panini Champions League 2014-2015

The official sticker collection of the UEFA Champions League for the season 2014-2015 is an improved collection and guide of the major European club competition. The album includes 634 stickers of the 32 participating teams and this year there is a special sections dedicated to the 60 years of the competition. Stickers of the players are divided in two separated parts: the player photo to be glued in the team page and the player details to be glued in the double summary page of the group. This interesting feature was introduced last season and this year it includes also the club badges.

The album opens as usual with an introduction that includes stickers about the competition. This year there are only four stickers: panini logo, champions league trophy, the ball, and the "Respect" logo. The album continues with the presentation of the groups with all the 32 shining club badges displaced over four pages. Then the participating teams are showed following the group order. For each team there are 18 stickers (19 including the club badge) on two pages: 11 regular players are placed on the page according to the tactics of the team (for instance for Atletico Madrid making a 4-2-3-1 disposition), whereas 7 substitutes are placed on the right of the page. At the end of each group there is a double page with the mini stickers that are part of each player/badge sticker. This is a wonderful overview of all player characteristics.

Group A: Atletico Madrid, Juventus, Olympiacos, Malmoe

Group B: Real Madrid, Basel, Liverpool, Ludogorets

Group C: Benfica, Zenit, Bayer Leverkusen, Monaco

Group D: Arsenal, Borussia D., Galatasaray, Anderlecht

In the center of the album there is a section with 20 stickers about the 60 European Cups finals of the competition.

Group E: Bayern M., Manchester C., CSKA M., Roma

Group F: Barcelona, PSG, Ajax, APOEL

Group G: Chelsea, Schalke, Sporting Lisboa, Maribor

Group H: Porto, Shakhtar, Athletic Club, Bate Borisov

The album ends with a sticker for the Women's Champions League and one sticker for the Youth League.

Young talents

The Champions League album includes stickers of the most famous football players, but it is also an occasion to discover young talents that will be the future stars of football. In this album there are interesting young prospects and rookie stickers.

Benfica's new talent is the Brazilian Talisca (1994), who played all the matches of the group stage and scored one goal against Monaco. Barcelona's new discovery is El Haddadi (1995), who impressed in his first appearances with Barcelona. Anderlecht and Ajax have very young teams with great potential: Tielemans (1997), Praet (1994) and Mitrovic (1994) are already key players of Anderlecht, whereas Kishna (1995) and El Ghazi (1995) are the new "crack" of Dutch football and they have their rookie sticker in this album; El Ghazi scored one goal against Barcelona at Camp Nou. These and other young talents are summarized in the pictures below.